Gif vs. interactive animation:
- Gif (short animation) is straightforward and self-explaining. It quickly drags users’ attention and motivates them to engage with the data exploration.
- Gif is convenient because the data processing and comparison was already done and the results are visualy communicated to easily understand the dataset behavior and grasp the main information without having to interact with the dataset.
- Interactive animation requires users’ action to interact with the dataset, which makes it more time consuming.
Conclusion: use gif to drag users’ (or readers’) attention, and interactivity to enable user to do further data exploration.